Deadwood, Season 3

I finally finished watching the third and final season of Deadwood, which aired on HBO in 2006. It was kind of a chore--though the series was cancelled because of high production costs, it was spinning its wheels, adding characters for seemingly no particular reason and bowing under the weight of its florid language.

This season was dominated by the town against George Hearst, the real-life mining magnate (and father of William Randolph) who wants to buy the large and profitable gold mine from Alma (Molly Parker). While there, he engages in a tense, mostly cold war with Al Swearingen (Ian McShane) the profane and colorful owner of the Gem, the town's saloon, and the taciturn Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), who at one point drags Hearst off to jail by his ear. Hearst, played by Gerald McRaney, was a real person, but his family can't be happy with this potrayal, which basically says he was close to inhuman, caring about nothing but gold.

All of the other regulars are around, but none of their plot threads are very interesting. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) falls into a romance with Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), the ex-whore; Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) recovers from a stab wound, and grows slowly mad with rage at being treated as a lackey by Hearts; E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), sells his hotel to Hearst, and delivers a few of his self-pitying monologues, and Doc (Brad Dourif) has a debilitating lung disease.

New characters are introduced, such as Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), also a real person, an actor who brings his theater company to Deadwood. As if the character of this show weren't already speaking in a faux Shakespearean tone, Cox trumps them all. Also, bewilderingly, two of the Earp Brothers show up for a few episodes, but they make no impact.

None of the magic from the first two seasons are here in the third. The language almost becomes a parody of itself, and the motivations of the characters, and their alignments, seem to be constantly shifting. There are a few memorable moments, mostly involving violence: Swearingen's henchman, W. Earl Brown, has an epic streetfight with Hearst's henchman, and Swearingen viciously kills one of Hearst's agents.

Because the series ended without a chance to sum everything up, there is a sense of incompleteness. It was thought a TV-movie or two would rap things up, but that didn't happen. They never did get to the huge fire that devastated the Chinese community.